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India's fashion industry is currently enjoying a boom, with growing numbers of Indian designers such as Manish Arora and Rohit Bal enjoying success in Europe and the United States. Many more have become household names throughout India's main cities where an increasingly affluent middle class is buying up luxury brands.

Local fashion shows have become major media events, but while white Russians, Brazilians and European models are cashing in, some of India's top models have complained they are losing out on the best jobs in their own country and being paid a fraction of the fees of their European rivals.

Leading model and actress Dipannita Sharma said she believed the Indian fashion industry was in denial and that it would take many years for the prejudice to fade. "It's not just the fashion industry, India per se is obsessed with white skin. We will take another hundred years to completely get over it. The industry doesn't openly agree that preferring foreign models over Indian models just for the skin tone is racism. It has some kind of fairness obsession," she said.

"One could have understood, if it was about getting supermodels of international fame or to work in India but that's not happening, it's just they want fairer skin on the Indian ramps," she added.

Pranab Awasti of Delhi's Glitz Modelling agency, said Indians themselves preferred white skin to their own and craved "fair" complexions.

"Indians in general have that inferiority complex, we have had a hangover about fair skin, since the British left India. The idea of fairness is an Indian concept and it needs to change. It is an inherent thing in Indians to see white as beautiful and black as ugly ... we have this concept in our minds that only fair-skinned people can be models," he said.

Indian supermodel Carol Gracias said the most successful Indian models were paid between £500 and £600 per show, a tiny fraction of the rates paid to their western counterparts, while lucrative Indian television commercial jobs mostly went to western models.

"You never see a dark-skinned girl on TV ads and that's where the lucrative work is. Everyone uses fair-skinned girls, people use skin-lighteners like 'Fair and Lovely'. I don't - maybe I would have been fair and lovely by now," she said.